Friday, January 15, 2010

THE Rudd Government is handing more than $70 million to schools run by the Exclusive Brethren, a religious sect Kevin Rudd described as an "extremist cult" that breaks up families.

The sect's schools have secured more than $8.4m under the Government's school building stimulus package and they will share in $62m in recurrent taxpayer funding.

Documents show a Brethren-run school at Swan Hill in northern Victoria was granted $1.2m for a library and $800,000 for a hall when its most recent annual report shows it had just 16 pupils and already had a library.

Grants data released by the commonwealth shows that Brethren schools in every state received funding under the $12.4 billion schools stimulus package, The Australian reports.

Despite the Brethren's past disdain for computers, figures show its schools have received more than 300 under the commonwealth computers-in-school initiative.

Brethren schools have also secured grants under the Schools Pride program. All up, the 2400 children in Brethren schools will each receive the equivalent of $26,127 in recurrent funding and $11,200 in stimulus funding.

Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said these sums were outrageous and the funding system had to be urgently replaced.

"How can the Government justify handing tens of millions of dollars to an organisation it believes is a cult while public schools which educate the vast majority of our children are struggling for funds?" Mr Gavrielatos said.

"The Government has said it will review schools funding this year. That review needs to be begin as a matter of urgency to allow for a proper public debate on where school funding should be directed and for what purpose."

The Brethren is a fundamentalist Christian sect that lives by the doctrine of separation from mainstream society.

Brethren schools must teach the normal curriculum, although reports say some novels are banned and chapters on sex and reproduction are excised from science textbooks.

Brethren members are taught to shun broader society. They do not use TV, radios and do not watch movies or eat in restaurants. They do not vote, are opposed to unions and other forms of association, except their own church.

The Brethren has been accused by former members, and the Prime Minister in his 2007 comments, of denying those who leave access to their children, a claim the organisation denies.

Doug Burgess, the head of the Brethren's Victorian schools, said its schools were growing rapidly and the funding reflected that.

He defended the sect's right to school funding, saying the children would otherwise be enrolled in state schools at full taxpayers' expense.

A SYDNEY public school teacher's assistant has appeared in court following a sex scandal with her lesbian lover.

Nepean High School teacher's assistant Sharron Anne Lee, 40, was involved in a threesome at a drunken New Year's Eve sex party which later descended into a brawl, The Sunday Telegraph reports.

Parramatta Bail Court heard yesterday that Lee, a teacher's assistant, had fought with her girlfriend of three years, Carlie-Anne Bell, from Glenmore Park, in her bedroom while the man they had picked up at the Penrith Panthers club, Nikola Murgevski, watched on horrified.

The three had continued partying at Rooty Hill RSL before retiring to Lee's bedroom after playing "strip pool" in Lee's backyard, the court heard.

Court documents said the fight had begun because Bell was upset that Lee was having sex with Murgevski.

The alleged attack saw Bell hospitalised with a tear to her bowel lining and severe bleeding.

Bell was rushed to Nepean Hospital where she was expected to undergo surgery.

The Court heard Lee was a teacher's assistant at the school in an "Aboriginal program"

SENSITIVE images of the Tiananmen Square massacre appear in Google's search results as the company threatens to leave China over cyberattacks.

While Google has clarified that it is still censoring search results in China according to the country's law, sensitive images can still be found in its image search.

The iconic "Tank Man" photo taken during the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown was available on Google's Chinese website, Google.cn, yesterday. The picture of a Chinese man who boldly stood in front of a line of tanks during the crackdown on pro-democracy protests made headlines around the world. The event is still hugely sensitive in China.

Google has threatened to defy Chinese internet censors and risk banishment from the lucrative market in outrage at "highly sophisticated" cyber attacks aimed at Chinese human rights activists. China-based cyber spies struck the internet giant and at least 20 other unidentified firms in an apparent bid to hack into the email accounts of activists around the world, Google said this week. While Microsoft denied its mail services had been compromised, Yahoo backed Google's decision. "We stand aligned with Google that these kinds of attacks are deeply disturbing and strongly believe that the violation of user privacy is something that we as internet pioneers must all oppose," Yahoo said. White House backingUS Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Beijing to explain the cyber attacks. "We look to the Chinese government for an explanation," the chief US diplomat said. "The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy." The online espionage has Google reconsidering its business operations in China and it said it does not wish to filter internet search engine results in that country. "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China," Google chief legal officer David Drummond said this week. "We are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all," he said.

"We recognise that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China." Activists agreeHuman rights activists hailed Google, voicing hope it would lead Western companies to reconsider their compromises in doing business in China. "Through international pressure, finally a big business in the West has come to realize its own conscience," said prominent Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, who spent 18 years in prison before entering exile in the US. T. Kumar, the Washington-based advocacy director of Amnesty International, urged other internet companies to follow Google's lead. "We're glad that at last international internet companies are waking up to the reality that they cannot go along with oppressive nations like China," Mr Kumar said.

UN and other aid agencies warn they face major logistical challenges in getting essential relief to survivors of Haiti's deadly earthquake.

Some aid is being handed out, with World Food Program (WFP) spokesman Charles Vincent saying 2,400 people in some districts of the flattened Haitian capital Port-au-Prince should receive food today. "Obviously it's a drop in a bucket but it's a start," he said, adding that distribution would be widened once roads were cleared. "Most of the population have not had food for the whole day yesterday and today. As a result a certain insecurity is feared." The scale of devastation caused by Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude quake means the WFP has been unable to gain access to its warehouses and Vincent was unsure if they had been damaged or looted.

A spokeswoman for the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Elisabeth Byrs, warned that relief agencies faced major logistics challenges on the ground. While the airport at Port-au-Prince was functioning, its control tower was still down, she said. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) appealed for tents to shelter homeless survivors and said it was was gearing up to distribute vital supplies. "What we need is tents, tents and more tents. We need large or individual tents, whatever is available, and financial support quickly," Vincent Houver, the IOM's chief of mission in Haiti, said in a statement. The organisation said it would provide tarpaulins, plastic sheeting, cans and water containers from stocks already in the impoverished country to help some 10,000 families. Haiti's prime minister warned the death toll could top 100,000, though President Rene Preval gave a more conservative estimate of 50,000. The death toll from Haiti's catastrophic earthquake will reach 10s of thousands of people, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.

She described the earthquake as "an unimaginable disaster" in the country.

Her stark warning came as an official close to George W. Bush confirmed to Fox News that the former US president plans to work closely with his democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, now a UN special envoy to Haiti, on relief efforts.

Britain pledged more than £6 million ($10.5 million) in aid to the devastated island nation, where residents were desperately awaiting a global effort to find and treat survivors from an earthquake that left streets strewn with corpses.

Schools, hospitals, hotels and even the presidential palace lay in ruins, with people caked in blood and dust pleading for help after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck just southwest of Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.

Casualty figures were impossible to calculate, but Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN the final death toll from the quake could be "well over 100,000."

Branches of the Red Cross and Red Crescent were expecting to help a "maximum of three million people," some of whom were still trapped beneath mountains of concrete.

The epicentre of the quake hit near the slum of Carrefour, where people were living in flimsy shacks. Initial reports suggested that over 90 per cent of its buildings are in ruins.

Cedric Perus, Oxfam's humanitarian coordinator in Port-au-Prince, said: "I have seen wounded people flooding into the hospitals, and buildings of several stories high that are now totally flat. Several thousands have probably died in the quake, but it will take time to get a full picture.

"Bodies may stay under the rubble for a long time because it is difficult to access some sites and heavy-lifting equipment is in limited supply.

"There are bodies all over the city," he said.

"People have nowhere to put them so they wrap them in sheets and cardboards in the hope that the authorities will pick them. People have also piled bodies in front of the city's main hospitals."

INTERNATIONAL scientists nudged back the minute hand of the symbolic Doomsday Clock,as they praised US President Barack Obama for helping to pull the world back from nuclear or environmental catastrophe.

"It is six minutes to midnight," the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS), which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 as a barometer of how close the world is to an apocalyptic end.

"For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are co-operating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material," the statement by the panel of international scientists, including 19 Nobel laureates, said.

"For the first time ever, industrialised and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable."

A key player in the new, global era of co-operation was Mr Obama, whose election in 2008 ushered in "a change in the US government's orientation toward international affairs", said Professor Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of BAS's board of sponsors, speaking at the ceremony to turn back the hands of the symbolic clock.

Mr Obama brought with him to the White House "a more pragmatic, problem-solving approach" than his predecessor, George W. Bush, the scientists said.

"Not only has Obama initiated new arms reduction talks with Russia, he has started negotiations with Iran to close its nuclear enrichment program, and directed the US Government to lead a global effort to secure loose fissile material in four years," Prof Krauss said, reading from the BAS statement.

Since it was created by scientists who helped to develop the world's first atomic weapons, the Doomsday clock has come to be seen as a measure of what progress, if any, the world has made in moving away from the risk of nuclear, climate-caused or bio-warfare catastrophe.

Midnight on the clock signifies the apocalypse, and the minute hand symbolises the countdown to disaster.

The last time the minute hand was moved was in 2007, when Bush was president.

Then, the clock was bumped two minutes closer to midnight.

In resetting the clock this year, the scientists said they were encouraged by recent developments, but had chosen to put back the clock by only one minute to show they were "mindful that the clock is ticking", said Prof Krauss.

"By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasise how much needs to be accomplished" while at the same time recognising that global co-operation has moved forward, he said.

Putting back the clock by only one minute also meant that "there's great potential for it to move again, in either direction", said Prof Krauss.

Which way the hands of the clock are moved next time was up to scientists, world leaders and ordinary people, said Prof Krauss, urging them all to seize the "unique opportunity we have right now to begin to free ourselves from the terror of nuclear weapons and slow drastic changes to our shared global environment.

"We are now poised at a unique time, with hope and opportunity. Let's not blow it," he said.

A BRITISH radio presenter has been sacked after he pulled the plug on the Queen's traditional Christmas Day speech, telling listeners it was "boring".

Tom Binns has lost his job at Birmingham radio station BRMB after listeners complained over his interruption of the monarch's traditional December 25 broadcast to Britain and the Commonwealth.

"Two words: Bor-ring," he said on air as he stopped the broadcast, before quipping "from one Queen to another..." as he put on Last Christmas by pop duo Wham, featuring openly gay singer George Michael.

Binns explained that the incident occurred after the Queen's Speech - a decades-old tradition still watched by millions of Britons and others every year - came on at a point when he had expected a regular news bulletin.

"I was working on my own on Christmas Day; I'd even had to let myself into the studio," he told the Chortle comedy website.

"After the guy before me finished, we should have taken the news from Sky, and then my show would start.

"But instead of the news, we got the Queen's speech.

"I knew it shouldn't be there, but having never heard it before, I didn't know how long it was going to go on for.

"I'm not trained to make editorial decisions, but I decided to get rid of it and make a joke. I said, 'Two words: bor-ring'.

"I then went into an old riff about how people say the royal family are good for tourism, but the French beheaded theirs and people still visit France."

Binns then cued up the Wham song.

He added that one listener got really angry.

"He sent me a message saying I should be sent to Basra and hoped I'd get killed by a roadside bomb... but other than that almost all the texts we received were in support of what I'd done."

The radio station's parent company, the Orion Media Group programme, said the DJ's comments were "inappropriate".

"We do not condone what he said in any way, whether said in jest or not," its programme and marketing director, David Lloyd, told the Birmingham Post.

"Tom will now not be featuring again on our radio stations."

Binns claimed "nobody would have tuned in to hear the Queen's speech" and that he "tried to deal with it in a funny way".

OUTBACK Steakhouse has agreed to pay $US19 million ($21 million) to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging sex discrimination against thousands of women at hundreds of its US restaurants, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said.

The Australian-themed restaurant discriminated against female employees and denied them equal opportunities for advancement.

The lawsuit, filed by the EEOC in federal court in Colorado in 2006, said female employees couldn't get promoted to the higher-level profit-sharing management positions in the restaurants and were denied favorable job assignments, particularly kitchen management experience, which was required for employees to be considered for the top management job.

"There are still too many glass ceilings left to shatter in workplaces throughout corporate America," EEOC Acting Chairman Stuart Ishimaru said.

"The EEOC will continue to bring class lawsuits like this one against employers who engage in gender discrimination on a systemic scale."

In addition to the money, the settlement requires that Outback launch an online application system for employees interested in managerial and other supervisory positions; hire a human resource executive in the newly created position of vice president of people; employ an outside consultant for at least two years who will determine compliance with the settlement terms and analyse data from the online application system to determine whether women have equal opportunities for promotion.

Tom Flanagan, a joint venture partner, allegedly said female managers had "let him down" and "lost focus" when they had children, ABC's Denver affiliate reported.

He also allegedly said women managers had trouble "saying no" and expressed a desire for "cute girls" to work as servers.

UMAR Farouk Abdulmutallab is a sexually frustrated loner who nurtured fantasies about holy war, his internet use reportedly reveals.

The twisted mind of the alleged bomber emerged in chilling messages he is said to have posted on an Islamic web forum, UK tabloid The Sun reports.

The Sun retrieved 300 of them in a special investigation into the suspected al-Qaeda fanatic.

In one, posted in 2005 when he was 19, he wrote: "I wont go into too much details about me fantasy, but basically they are jihad fantasies.

"I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win insha'Allah (God willing) and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!"

In another, he said: "Killing is only permitted in jihad."

And in a third, he complained of being depressed during his days at a boarding school in Togo.

He said he never found a true Muslim friend.

And he added: "As I get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and I struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities.

"This problem makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused."

The postings also reveal how he saw soccer as a potentially sinful sport. "Let's do activities like jogging, running, paint ball, archery (or any other sport of the like that teaches target and aim), swimming, wrestling, weightlifting, martial arts, some form of fitness training and so on."

Abdulmutallab, 23, allegedly tried to detonate explosives molded to his groin on a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit from Amsterdam on Christmas Day.